Ectoplasm

Ectoplasm is an original period drama set at a private séance in 1912, at the house of a hostess named Madame Montfort. The staging is immersive: the audience sits among the performers as silent onlookers, so the séance happens around you instead of on a stage across a gap.

The production comes from spit&vigor, a small New York company that runs its own studio theater and rents out subsidized space to other small troupes working on tight budgets. This is a new run of a play that first appeared in 2022.

The action takes place in the parlor of Madame Montfort, a roguish, eccentric hostess with a Byron-like flair. She has called a private séance. Around the table are a celebrated skeptical magician, a paranormal scientist and a blood ritualist, and the audience is counted among the guests.

Partway through the evening, a stranger nobody invited interrupts, and the ritual becomes a debate over what people truly believe about love, ghosts and mortality. Two mediums and the hostess are tied up in a love triangle, which adds personal stakes. An earlier description of the play called the magician a Houdini-like figure who holds the séance to expose spiritualist fraud, which sets up a contest between doubt and belief in the room.

The script mixes invented characters with real-world references. The illusionist Ira Orinthall is inspired by Harry Houdini, and the hostess takes her cues from the poetic, libertine persona of Lord Byron. The title points to ectoplasm, the white substance that mediums were said to produce from the mouth when they claimed to reach the dead.

As of October 2026, the nine-member cast is Laurel Creighton as Madame Montfort, Federico Mostert as Ira Orinthall, Sara Fellini as Sara Béraud Conlan, Adam Belvo as Elisha Kane, Steve Gamble as Kal Conlan, Yurika Ohno as Miska Crookes, Jesse Metz as George Crookes, George Walsh as Callum Holes and Azumi Tsutsui as Annette.

The play is performed in the company's own Tiny Baby Blackbox Theatre. The company's page gives the evening a running time of about 90 minutes.

Ectoplasm had its world premiere in January 2022 at The Players Theatre, at 115 MacDougal Street, where spit&vigor was in residence. The run was scheduled through February 6, 2022, and Covid delayed the opening by over a week. That version was staged with nine performers, as one act of about 90 minutes without an intermission.

The 2026 run is in the same building at 115 MacDougal Street, in spit&vigor's own third-floor space.